Smithsonian.com

"Thanks to her,” John Frederick Nims writes in his love poem to gravity, “All’s gala in the galaxy.” Such a deep appreciation for gravity’s wonderful predictability is, just by chance, a recurring theme of this year’s Smithsonian American Ingenuity Awards. Jeff Bezos is defying gravity with his spaceflight company’s reusable rocket ships. The scientists behind the stupendous LIGO instrument detected, for the first time ever, the whisper of a gravitational wave from the far reaches of the universe. And the rock band OK Go’s lighthearted nature was never so clear as in its topsy-turvy, low-gravity video. Those musical magicians, like all the American Ingenuity Award winners, dazzle us with their eagerness to break boundaries. And they make it look like fun.